No one on earth would be foolish enough to steal a Tibetan's picnic basket, especially once knowing the probable contents.
In the wildly unpredictable weather of a Lhasa spring evening I pushed my bike through some bushes to join a picnic with some like minded friends. These girls are the antithesis of brash worldliness. They are beautiful, they do everything shyly. As I help them unfold the mat to sit on we begin to pool our pittance of snacks for the picnic: pickled chicken feet, some sweet biscuits, some sunflower seeds, orange juice, and, my contribution, m&m cookies (aka. American Momo's). In case you haven't noticed, picnics in Tibet are not really about eating.
Picnics in Tibet, to the chagrin of Yogi bear or the hungry guest, are really about just being together. For about two hours I sat with these girls learning Tibetan praise songs, chatting about the weather and my Tibetan language progress, mulling over the crazy guards (who one minute told us we couldn't sit on the tree, the next minute told us we must sit on the tree), discussing why my thighs are so fat and why I don't have a boyfriend (I told them it was because my thighs were so fat... they didn't see the correlation), spitting sunflower seed shells everywhere, passing out cookies to random passersby who wanted to have a closer look at the strange foreigner, shivering in the clouds and sweating in the sun.
Picnic: noun: a meal eaten outdoors.
Allow me to offer this definition Webster's:
Picnic: noun: a chance to love the mess out of some sisters in desperate need of love.
